It's coming up to one year since our Kickstarter ended at 300% funded, launching our bookish business and starting my addiction to backing crowdfunding book and publishing projects of all kinds. The year since has been incredible - we've worked with some amazing people, made brilliant new friends, launched a monthly indie book club and had even more ideas for things we'd like to do in the future! Founding Ninja Book Box has been life changing in more ways than one and definitely has had a huge impact on the way that I choose and buy books. It's actually hard to overstate the degree to which I think about the provenance of the books I buy nowadays, which isn't to say that I never buy books published by the big 5 - I still do, in fact more than 50% of what I buy is still published by the big houses - but just that I'm aware to a degree that is pretty unrecognisable from pre Ninja Book Box times. It's a great thing.
We wanted to celebrate our first birthday/anniversary in huge style and totally in keeping with our company ethos of collaboration and trying to make the world a little bit better. For one whole month, from October 2nd - November 8th we're running an Indie Extravaganza on our blog. Each day we'll be featuring a small business or independent publisher in the form of profiles, interviews, product and book reviews. And now for the really really fun part....
Each business featured has donated something incredible that they've made or published as a raffle prize. There are three incredible prize bundles (each containing 8-10 gifts and each worth in excess of £70) and all of the money raised (after fees) will go straight to our amazing charitable partner, Give a Book. Currently we donate £1 for each box we sell to their work with various literacy charities getting books to those who need them most.
If you're reading this then you're probably aware of the power that books have to really make lives better. I don't think I can overstate the importance of literacy to us and how strongly we feel about everyone having access to books. Imagine your life without it - it's a scary thing! We'll be featuring some of the projects that Give a Book works with as part of the series so look out for more information on that.
We are so ridiculously excited about this and have been working so hard getting all the posts for the series written. The generosity of the businesses involved has just been phenomenal so now we just need all of you reading this to come out in support of it and help us to raise loads of money for literacy charities!
Raffle tickets are available now and are £2 each. You can buy as many as you like and we will ship the prizes to the winners wherever in the world they are. You can follow the blog series by subscribing to the blog via email (through the sign up box in the right hand sidebar) or by following us on Bloglovin. We're using #ninjabirthdayraffle on social media so please please do whatever you can to spread the word! Definitely also buy some raffle tickets if you can afford it - we'll be announcing the prizes donated on each days' post but you can see some examples on our Indie Extravaganza page.
Without people to buy raffle tickets there is no point in us having all these amazing prizes so please do whatever you can to support it - buy tickets, post about it on social media, send your friends links to this blog post or to the Indie Extravaganza home page. Everything helps and this could be such a fantastic way to end our first year and help bring the joy of books to so many people.
Thank you so much for a wonderful year, and for all the support you've given us so far. We really hope you'll enjoy the extravaganza and discover some brilliant new publishers and businesses, and we can't wait to announce the winners of the raffle and "hear" the squealing from the winners!
Winners drawn from a hat and announced November 10th.